Tuesday, July 10, 2012

The myth of America

Like
any organized religion, America comes with its own creation story, a
beautiful, inspiring myth used to lend legitimacy to our modern
priestly class in Washington. But
there's another story worth considering: the actual one of how
the founders of the United States saw their new government as a
protection against democracy -- as a means of safeguarding
privilege and elevating the right to property over the rights of the
people.

During
the debate on the US constitution, the founders were pretty explicit
about this, making it abundantly clear that protecting property –
the large estates gifted to them by the British crown, the men and
women sold to them by slave traders – was a driving force behind
their push for a more powerful central government. James Madison, for
instance, who would serve as the young republic's fourth president,
warned his fellow founders of the perils of democracy, saying too much of itwould
jeopardize the property of the landed aristocracy. “In England,”
he observed, “if elections were open to all classes of people, the
property of the landed proprietors would be insecure.” Land would
be redistributed to the landless, he cautioned. Without the rich
exercising monopoly privileges over the commons, the masses would be
less dependent on elites like them.

Rather
than open up elections to the riff-raff – the 99 percent –
Madison argued the American state ought to be structured so as “to
protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” And he
wasn't alone. Another delegate to the 1787 constitutional convention,
the country's first attorney general, Edmund Randolph, said
thatas
he saw it from looking at the example of the states, “Our chief
danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” In
the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton derided the allegedly “pure
democracy” of the ancients, saying
they “never
possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was
tyranny; their figure deformity.”

Though
wrapped in the detached language of political science, for the
founders this anti-democratic position was borne of self-interest.
When they warned of minorities losing their “rights” to the
majority, they meant their
rights to
get paid on the federal
bonds they owned
and to be protected from egalitarian political movements to discharge
existing debts. Most significantly, it meant protections for their
claimed right to own other people.

At
the time of America's founding, afull
20 percent of the US population was
enslaved.
It was the 1 percent, the slaveowners, who called that freedom and
agitated for a break with Britain, where abolitionist sentiment was
dangerously on the rise. According
to historian Simon
Schama,
the revolution favored by the small minority of white aristocrats who
founded the US government “was a revolution, first and foremost,
mobilized to protect slavery." The sanctity of property rights,
which was and is enshrined in the Constitution, meant the literal
right to own another person.It
isn't that the story of America's founding is a total lie. There were
some strong
egalitarian tendencies
in colonial days, including people-powered movements to restrict the
amount of property the rich could claim as their own – they just
weren't the dominant strains. It's
also not the case that America is the only country to whisper sweet
nothings to itself about its historic greatness; all countries tend
to that – that'sthe
point.
The United States was founded not by deities but, like all
nations, flawed human beings. If we want to avoid the mistakes of the
past, though, we need to acknowledge past mistakes and the often
vulgar motivations of those in power. Perpetuating a myth only
furthers the cause of ignorance – and the interests of those who
profit from an ignorant public.

3 comments:

I've been noticing a lot of mythologizing, especially after conversations I had during the previous week. Many - if not most - Americans seem to think that there was a tea party in Boston, followed by a war, immediately followed by the USA complete with stars and stripes and baby Jesus giving his blessing to the US mint (ok, that last part I made up). Folks don't seem to realize that the "USA" didn't come about until 1788 or so, not 1776, and when asked what happened in '76, not a small number will say 'the constitution'. Not that I think it matters much in the end, but I do find it interesting how the myth itself reshapes over time. But then, I guess that's what all myths do.

Also, fucking captchas are getting to the point where even humans can't read them.